Measuring the Success of a Social Media Campaign

Using social media as a marketing platform can either make or break your business. As you know, one wrong move and your brand can end up being viral for a whole slew of negative reasons. More frequently, however, mistakes made within a social media campaign simply slowly erode your brand equity or end up as a colossal waste of time.

So, how can you quantify or measure the effectiveness of your social campaign?

Set Measurable Objectives

Before even thinking of launching a social media campaign, set up clear and measurable objectives. Don’t do Facebook just because you’re supposed to do Facebook; consider how it may help increase your sales and profits.

As you’re setting objectives, put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What is a reasonable step they may take from a social media platform to engage with your brand? If you’re selling a high-ticket item, don’t expect a flood of sales from LinkedIn just because your audience happens to be there. Few will change directions so quickly that they won’t immediately leave LinkedIn and call your business to buy a $10,000 product or service. However, they may read your thought leadership article. If you fall into this camp, where you cannot reasonably expect an immediate sale, then you really need to be strategic in how you structure your campaign. You’ll either use LinkedIn as a platform to establish and grow your brand (personal, or for your business name), or as the top part of a multi-step sales funnel.

Once you’ve strategized, establish metrics to which you may hold yourself or your team accountable. It’s okay, then, if LinkedIn does not generate direct sales, as long as you have metrics such as followers, website traffic, webinar signups (whatever you decide is a critical and appropriate step in the sales funnel) that fit into your overall strategy for increasing sales. Ultimately, you do want to measure how well the campaign impacts sales, but don’t make the mistake of shutting off prematurely or without considering other benefits such as increased brand awareness or engagement.

Useful Social Media Analytics Tools

Practical and inexpensive tools may help you measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign. Let’s start with the basics: use the free information given to you by the social media platforms themselves. Facebook, for example, shows your progress on page views, likes, reach, engagements, video views, and the performance of your posts and ads, such as money spent, cost per lead, website traffic, etc.

You may also use Google Analytics to see how people interact with your website after being referred from a social media site. To maximize the use of Google Analytics, make sure you’re using Google’s URL builder to tag links with campaign information. To really simplify your measurement, when you run a social media campaign, send the traffic to a landing page dedicated exclusively for that campaign and social channel. This way, you’ll know that anyone who contacted you through that landing page came from that social campaign. This allows you to associate your time and money costs with results.

If this is way over your head or you simply don’t have the time to get it right, I’m here to help. You can reach me at gregg@plan2profit.com.

Sources:

How to measure the success of your social media campaigns, BritishLibrary.UK

5 Easy Steps to Measure Social Media Campaigns, Entrepreneur.com

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ABOUT GREGG RUAIS

Gregg Ruais is a small business marketing consultant and the Founder of the Plan2Profit Digital Marketing Agency. A career marketer since 2004, Gregg has been directly involved with well over $50 million in sales as a copywriter, strategist, and Marketing Director. He earned an MBA from the University of Connecticut and has been published by Time Inc Affluent Media Group and YouGov.